Davie, Donald: Hyphens
[from Collected Poems (1990), Carcanet]
1 You remember Rossignano
2 Solvay, impossible hybrid,
3 Italian-Belgian? The hyphen
4 Was stretched to breaking.
...
21 There too the hyphen stretched
22 In him to breaking, out of
23 Maremman cities where his Fiat spun
24 In week-end pieties
...
29 Holding these halves together,
30 His Tuscan strove
31 For a coining of new compounds:
32 Firm-transient, chemical-civic.